Exploration

Archive: 27 June 2011

Now available: the results from the A List Apart Survey for People Who Make Web Sites, 2010. This is the fourth industry snapshot we’ve compiled, and the story that’s emerged over that time is proving to be pretty consistent. You can get a high-level view from the Introduction, and then dive deeper into the results in the following chapters. And, as is traditional, the Addendum contains links to the full (anonymized) data set in three formats for your own analytical investigations. We’d love to see what you come up with!

Something that surprised me quite a bit was that in 2010 we got about half the number of respondents we’ve gotten in past years—not quite seventeen thousand participated in 2010 instead of just over thirty thousand as we saw in previous years. I’m not quite sure what to make of that. Is the industry shrinking? Did we not get the word out as effectively? Was it a bad time of year to run a survey? Are people getting tired of taking the survey? There’s no real way to know.

At least there weren’t any wild swings in the results, which might have indicated we’d lost some subgroups in disproportionate numbers. Whatever caused the drop in participation, it appears to have done so in an evenly-distributed fashion.

Regardless, I’d like to see higher participation next year, so if anyone has good suggestions regarding how to make that happen, please do let me know in the comments.

We plan to run the 2011 survey in the next couple of months (and I’ll post a bit more about that soon) but for now, I hope you find the 2010 results an interesting and useful look at who we are.